AS ROBOTS become more powerful and pervasive, humans have a lot of questions to grapple with. Will human rights be extended to them? Could robots one day take over the human race? Will robots be our soldiers of the future? When will robots be able to do all the housework? Professor Noel Sharkey, a leading robotics and artificial intelligence expert from the University of Sheffield, UK, answers some of those questions as ET’s Ritwik Dondecatches up with him.
What is the present situation in terms of use of robots? Are they used for industrial purposes more?
- Yes. The world-wide stock is huge. It is especially big for service robots. Now there are two types of service robots: one is the professional robots of which almost 40,000 are in use across the world majorly by industries. And then there are personal robots of which 3.5 million are in use. But if you talk of spending, of the nearly $5.6 billion spent on the technology and deployment, professional service robots had an 80% share.
So is the pattern of use changing?
-Yes. Lot more consumer robots are coming out now most of them being cleaning and surgical robots. The most interesting of them is the surgical robots which is growing very rapidly especially for use in bypass surgery and removal of prostate cancer. So, what they do is make four tiny holes and operate by inserting robots through the holes. This allows for people to recover weeks in advance than normal surgery. It also means that surgeons no longer have to be in the same place. You can operate on a patient in the UK while the doctor is in India or the US. The other kind which is gaining in popularity is military robots. Military robots are the biggest growth area in robotics. The US plans to spend $4 billion up to 2010 on unmanned systems increasing the spends to $24 billion by 2015.
Can robots be made to think then as they show in sci-fi movies?
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) has produced incredible achievements. Today it is all pervasive. It’s in your car, it is in your fridge. There is two kinds of AI — one like a software for PCs in robots and other mythological AI, which is what you get in sci-fi movie or a novel. Academics argue that there is no reason why we can’t we make a conscious machine — a sentium machine. But then I am also a psychologist, so all I want is one glimmer of evidence supporting this dream. At the moment these are just arguments. And such arguments are dangerous because they can mislead policy makers and these policy makers would in turn implement policies thinking that these machines are actually intelligent, when in reality they are just dumb machines without ability to think of themselves.
Will they ever come close to being human?
-Yes they will. But in terms of touch and feel only. There is talk about the use of silicon to make them more human-like. But now scientists are also experimenting with mixing animals with the robots. What drives my curiosity is how can you use the available technology to manipulate the instruction set within an animal. The Americans have managed to put a chip (called coupled oscillators) inside the spinal column of centipede to remotely control its feet movement. Also there are experiments being carried out to install smaller chips in the pupae of a moth so that they can manipulate the movement of the moth when it grows into an adult. Experiments are also on for creating remote controlled cockroaches and rats in the same fashion.
Is that the future of robotics then?
- Yes so to say. No doubt that robots would reach a critical mass and become as pervasive as computers. But the robots we are talking about would be more like gadgets rather than robots in human forms or humanoids. Sensors are getting sophisticated and nano-technology is helping to miniaturise them. But that does not mean that there won’t be humanoids. Honda’s Asimov has shown that they can happen. We will have lot of robot servants. But if you ask me, entertainment robots would be huge. There is also huge potential for them in the toy market.
According to Prof Kevin Warwick, a cybernetics expert at University of Reading, by 2050 robots would overtake human race, what’s your take on it?
-Well, contempt really!! It is like climbing a tree to reach the moon. As I said robots are stupid machines. But having said that robots could be used to do more menial jobs like cleaning gutters and toilets that are degrading to humans. And then you could also use them for assisting the handicapped like using robotic arms and legs for the amputees that can be easily done.
No comments:
Post a Comment